Use of string variables:

The Characters involve letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks, digits, white space, and control characters. The Control characters are characters which cannot be printed, but complete a task (like backspace or tab). The Whitespace characters involve the tab, space, newline (that moves the cursor down to the next line), and carriage return (that moves the cursor to the starting of the present line). The Leading blanks are blank spaces at the starting of a string, for illustration, 'hello', and trailing blanks are the blank spaces at end of a string.

There are some ways that the string variables can be formed. The one is using an assignment statement which is as shown below:

>> word = 'cat';

The other method is to read into the string variable. Recall that to read into the string variable by using the input function, the second argument 's' should be involved:

>> strvar = input('Enter a string: ', 's')

Enter a string: xyzabc

strvar =

xyzabc

If leading or trailing blanks are typed by the user, then these will be stored in the string. For illustration, in the following the user entered four blanks and then 'xyz':

>> s = input('Enter a string: ','s')

Enter a string:     xyz

s =

xyz